Suchergebnisse

The #MeToo movement gained global prominence after Hollywood celebrities came forward with their experiences of sexual violence and encouraged others to do the same. This was by no means the first time a woman had told the world of her experience of sexual violation, but this time, the powerful were paying attention: "Women have been saying these things forever. It is the response to them that has changed" (MacKinnon 2020, 7). High-quality investigative journalists vetted the women's accounts and provided more stories of sexual abuse and predation. Many survivors have since come forward with their own names and their perpetrators' names, leading some prominent men to be deprived of their fame and positions of power. The #MeToo movement makes two things matter and count: what the victims say and what the perpetrators did. It has raised the perpetrators' accountability and the victims' credibility and reversed the scenario of sexual violation: making the perpetrator, not the victim, pay for the sexual harm.

In Taiwan, paternal preference has a long history, and the introduction of the best interests of the child doctrine is a relatively new development attributed to the feminist legal reform movement. Yet anti-feminist fathers' rights movements, which are widespread in many countries, find no counterpart in Taiwan. This article explores the unusual relationship between feminist custody law reform and fathers' rights advocacy and argues that this relationship has been developed in a context where the idea of formal equality prevails and the development of post-divorce custody arrangements is both constitutive and reflective of this idea. The discussion begins with a review of how fathers' rights were privileged in law, challenged, and then reclaimed in the name of gender neutrality as gender equality. It is followed by an investigation into the reality of post-divorce custody arrangements, which identifies the trend towards "equal" distribution and debunks the myth of the courts' maternal preference. This finding leads to the conclusion that the chorus of formal equality by both feminist and fathers' rights advocates has handicapped the emergence of an anti-feminist fathers' rights movement. It also suggests the need for critical reflections on formal equality and further empirical studies of child custody that would better inform the pursuit of gender equality.